Nintendo Puts a Hold on Vitality Sensor After Poor Testing

Nintendo has confirmed in its notes, from the 73rd annual investors meeting, that the peripheral first unveiled at the 2009 Electronic Entertainment Expo would not be coming to market.

CEO of Nintendo Satoru Iwata explained,

“The Wii Vitality Sensor was under development as an accessory for Wii. We thought it would be interesting to understand how the human autonomic nerve functions while using the Wii Vitality Sensor, and we did develop trial software and showed the media some of its features.”

“However, after a large-scale test of a prototype inside the company, we found out that for some people, the sensor did not work as expected,” Iwata said. “We wondered if we should commercialize a product which works as expected for 90 people out of 100, but not so for the other 10 people. Though I am sorry that we did not give any specific updates after this product’s initial announcement, I would say that knowing that a product has a problem, we should not launch it for the sole reason that we have already announced it.”

So for now the project seems to be shelved but Iwata explained that if the technical difficulties of getting the device to work for a higher percentage of users, then we could look for it to surface again.